HOLY SPIDERS!

BlEWWW my mind as I saw this on a friend’s facebook page. If I can imagine a specific place that I would NEVER want to be EVER. Its up this frickin tree. But its still frickin COOL!

A

The Silver Lining, The Spider Webs! An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters. Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of SIN-dh have never seen this phenome…non before but, they also report that there are now far fewer mosquitoes than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around. It is thought that the mosquitoes are getting caught in the spiders web, thus, reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods..~~~

 

911 prestes Maia. Records of happiness and dignity

911 Prestes Maia, a 22-story tower block in central São Paulo, Brazil, is thought to have been the largest squat in the world. In 2006, the abandoned building was home to an estimated 1,630 people, including 468 families with 315 children. In 2002, the ‘Movement for the Homeless’ transplanted hundreds of homeless families into the empty building and made the place habitable, even going so far as providing a library, cinema, and workshops. The new residents drove out vermin and drug dealers, all the while cleaning up the place. Then, suddenly in March of 2006, the inhabitants learned that within a month they were going to be evicted. Julio Bittencourt photographed the diverse occupants at their windows, from which they communicated with one other, recording the happiness and dignity in coexistence with decay and neglect. Since Bittencourt was raised in São Paulo, he became accustomed to people communicating across windows, as family and friends lived on top of and next to each other

 

food for thought

A

The face of sydney

The face of Surrey Hill Residents

The face of Haymarket Residents

The city of Sydney have recently completed their sydney prject of which they have layered 160,000 resident portraits by male and females of the area.
This project I found to be SO interesting because it not only reflects by picture what sort of people live there but puts an exact face to what the neighborhood would look like if they all got together and birthed a child. I also took the liberty to pull up maps just to show the exactly where these people are living in relationship to one another.

Mouvements modernes

Merete Rasmussen

 

 

 

 

Beginnings of AAU

Ni Hao Readers and welcome to the Asia portion of this blog. About three weeks ago I arrived in Hong kong for the USC Asia Architecture & Urbanism Study abroad program and since then I’ve visited places like Guangzhou, ZhuHai, ZhongShan, Shenzhen, and the list goes on. Its only been about 3 weeks but its seems like its been forever.

Here is the AAU itinerary

AAU Schedule
HK: Aug. 30th – Sept. 2nd
Shenzhen: Sept. 3rd – Sept. 6th
Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhonshan, Zhuhai, Macau: Sept. 7th – Sept. 16
HK: Sept. 17th – Sept. 18th.
Seoul: Sept. 19th – Sept. 30th
Taiwan: Oct. 1st – Oct. 7th
Beijing: Oct. 8th, 9th – Oct. 15th
Shanghai: Oct. 16th – Dec. 7th
Tokyo: Dec. 8th – Dec. 10th
Kyoto: Dec. 11th – Dec. 14th

I haven’t quite edited my photos because we’ve been traveling so much and China is super annoying with the whole blog/facebook deal that its been hard to blog. But please check out our posts on the USC AAU wordpress site

http://uscaau.wordpress.com/

My entry is on there too (Urban Schizophrenia)

Enjoy! Will be posting soon

A

eat this planking

This past week while I was in Vegas, one of my friends Cassie was showing me pictures of people planking. If you are apparently a social hermit and don’t know what ‘planking’ is like I did- please look it up in an urban dictionary…. here

So right when i saw this post on sweet station i swear i had to share it. The project called Bodies in Urban Space was held in lower manhatten in NY and dancers started at sunrise and inched their way literally in the crevices of the Big Apple to form a live installation.  Makes you think about the unnoticed urban spaces doesn’t it?

choreographed by Willie Dorner

Forget Eat Pray Love- Move Eat Learn

catch these films i found off because i’m addicted

should be my motto now: Move EaT learn. Enjoy!

<3

 

reflections

Well- I’ve finally reached (almost) the end of my trip from europe and now I am currently with my family in the Vancouver. Its not exactly where i’m from but its as close to home as I can get. Here, all my nieces and nephews are running around, not to mention 2 small dogs, and as chaotic as it is, its really nice to come back to something I’m familiar with. I feel like for the past two months I’ve been essentially invisible. In a place where I don’t know anyone and no one knows me. Where I have no responsibilities and no places to go. Where for once looking at my text messages isn’t my  first instinct when i get up and writing lists isn’t my last instinct before i go to bed. It was liberating. But as liberating as it was traveling brought on new responsibilities. Responsibilities that pressured me to hunt for local cuisines, visit tourist sites, find places to live, find flights/trains/buses to places, buy knicknacks for my friends at home, and so many other things. I actually think this is the first time I’ve ever used a map so consistently since the 90s where I would sit next to my dad in the car and look for addresses on his library of maps in the dashboard. But with that, I understood cities much better. I knew their layouts and major points. If you ask me how to get to the hollywood bowl from my house i don’t think i can tell you regardless of the fact that i’ve been living in los angeles for the past 5 years. Funny how invisible a city can be when you only see it from an iphone.

As promised I will be posting my photos from the trip. enjoy!